Well, this has been a crazy time and I miss seeing all of you. As part of a course at UMass Amherst I am working with COVID-19 data, so I thought I would share some of what I have been doing with all of you as it might be interesting.

All of these figures are based on data available up to 10/5 that has been aggregated and made public by Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins University 2020). It is the same data ( and some of the same coding, done in a language called R (R Core Team 2015)) you see in graphics from a lot of major news sources and I use in all of my fish work (confession: I still like working with fish nerd data more, even if it is less timely! But this is cool too).

To start with, I generated maps of the cases and deaths reported so far in the world. For both maps, you can scroll over points to see the Country and number of cases or deaths. For areas with denser clusters of points, you can use the zoom tool or buttons at the top of the map to focus in or out. The autoscale button restores the original zoom level.

Zooming in a little, here is a look at the number of cases reported by county in the United States:

One thing I have found interesting in the news is a relative lack of the coverage of mortality rate is in the country, and how that might vary by region. So here is a map similar to the cases by county, but it reports mortality of infections (number of deaths/number of confirmed cases).

I also thought you all might be interested to see what things look like case wise in the states we all live in. The following three plots are interactive in that if you scroll your mouse over the counties you will be able to see the total number of cases in that county! I put marks where people live if you are not used to looking at county lines.

First, Connecticut:

Next, New York:

North Carolina:

Lastly, Massachusetts:

I hope this was interesting for all of you and if there is something else you would like to see just let me know! I love you all.

REFERENCES

Johns Hopkins University. 2020. “CORONAVIRUS Resource Center.” Website. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map.

R Core Team. 2015. “R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing.” Journal Article. http://www.R-project.org.